People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States

by Michael O. Emerson

It is sometimes said that the most segregated time of the week in the United States is Sunday morning. Even as workplaces and public institutions such as the military have become racially integrated, racial separation in Christian religious congregations is the norm. And yet some congregations remain stubbornly, racially mixed. People of the Dream is the most complete study of this phenomenon ever undertaken. Author Michael Emerson explores such questions how do racially mixed congregations come together? How are they sustained? Who attends them, how did they get there, and what are their experiences? Engagingly written, the book enters the worlds of these congregations through national surveys and in-depth studies of those attending racially mixed churches. Data for the book was collected over seven years by the author and his research team. It includes more than 2,500 telephone interviews, hundreds of written surveys, and extensive visits to mixed-race congregations throughout the United States.



People of the Dream argues that multiracial congregations are bridge organizations that gather and facilitate cross-racial friendships, disproportionately housing people who have substantially more racially diverse social networks than do other Americans. The book concludes that multiracial congregations and the people in them may be harbingers of racial change to come in the United States.

Genres: Race, Christian, Social Science, Sociology, Religion

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Michael O. Emerson (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, 1991) is Professor and Head in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has published widely in the areas of race, religion, and urban sociology. He is the author of 15 books and nearly 100 other publications, secured over 7 million dollars in research grants, helped secure over 20 million dollars in institutional grants, and has won several national awards for his research.

He has published with Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, New York University Press, Chicago University Press, Allyn & Bacon, Prentice-Hall, Palgrave Macmillan, ASR, AJS, Social Forces, Social Problems, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Urban Research and Practice, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Annual Review of Sociology, and Sociological Quarterly among others.

Dr. Emerson also has won 7 teaching awards, mentored many graduate students, and had his work appear in hundreds of media outlets. He has served as chair of the ASA’s Public Understanding of Sociology Award, Chair of the ASA’s Religion Section, President of the Association of the Sociology of Religion, on the Council of ASA’s Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section and is the founding associate editor of ASA’s Sociology of Race and Ethnicity journal.

Currently, he is the principal investigator of the largest study of race and religion ever conducted in the United States, funded by the Lilly Endowment. This project is a multimethod study involving thousands of interviews, several experiments, focus groups, participant observation, ethnography, and content analyses. Along with co-investigator Dr. Glenn Bracey (Villanova), he is working on two books from the project. Along with Dr. Gwendolyn Purifoye (North Park), he is also studying urban public transportation systems and their impact on racial inequality.